Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to the field of online collaboration, and more particularly to growing effective prospect answerers for community question-answer services.
Text-based communications utilizing the Internet have gained substantial popularity. One particular area of growth has been in the collaborative question-answer (cQA) services, sometimes referred to as community question-answer (QA) services. Internet sites providing question-answer services, hereafter referred to as “QA sites”, make use of the collective knowledge of very large groups of users, offering an efficient means to obtain answers to questions, and opportunities for users with expertise to voluntarily share their knowledge on a larger scale.
To identify users that consistently provide high quality answers to questions, hereafter referred to as answerers, QA sites enable question askers to accept answers provided, and many cases readers are able to “vote” for the “best answer” provided for an asked question. The use of large numbers of users to provide feedback on answers provides a quality check, and use of point systems by many QA sites effectively distinguishes answerers with expertise in various topics that frequently respond to questions.
Although a large number of users are registered with QA sites, data analysis typically indicates that a majority of questions are answered by a small number of answerers. In fact, most answerers have typically answered only one asked question. For QA sites to be responsive and effective, efforts have been taken to better direct questions of certain topics to answerers that have a demonstrated history of expertise and responsiveness in the topic areas. Although logical, this places increased demands on the smaller number of answerers that provide the majority of answers, and ignores the likelihood that answerers may not consistently be available or willing to respond to questions.
As QA sites grow with respect to users posting more questions, delays in response to answering questions or unanswered questions may show similar growth. Efforts to improve response to questions by routing topic-specific questions to expert-level answerers may reduce the inefficiencies of question discovery, but answerers may react negatively. The increasing number of questions pushed to them, inadequate filtering of topics matching answerers' expertise, and inconsideration of availability, may influence answerers to reduce or stop answering questions altogether.